Contracted: Phase II – Part I

September 14th, 2015 ~ 9:57 pm

Whelp, enough time has passed that Contracted: Phase II is now in theaters and VOD! It’s very impressive this all happened in less than a year from the film shoot. It helps that the film was already bought by IFC Midnight before production.

The North American premiere was in Chicago at the Bruce Campbell Horror Film Festival that was part of Wizard World Chicago. There were a whole bunch of us that flew out to be there so it was a ton of fun.

I got there Thursday and met up with Josh for dinner at this huge-ass bru-haus by the theater. It was really good and they had a full Polka band, some of which also played magical bells!

This place has the goods!

Legit bell & Polka band

I drink a huge beer!

Josh drinks all the beers! (not really)

Then we went to the opening night film Tales of Halloween, which was a great time! It’s an anthology of shorts, but there are a few little things along the way the connects them to at least one small town. It’s delightful. I think there are 11 segments. It’s out on VOD soon, so I highly recommend it. It was introduced by Mr. Campbell himself. Then there was an after party so we hung out with a bunch of the filmmakers (Axelle Carolyn, Mike Mendez, John Skipp I think, maybe Andrew Kasch? It was about a month ago and I’m shitty at names) as well as Tom Holland. He’s super friendly and his social media manager (or whatever her actual title is), Carrie, was a delight! We also got to hang out with Josh and Liam from Awesome Fest, from Philadelphia. It was a lovely evening.

Opening Night After-Partiers

Friday I hung out with my buddy I was staying with and visited the dog beach. It’s not often I get adorable doggy time. Then I got ready and met up with Josh to see June, which is pretty good but I had one big issue with the voice over. I won’t get into it here since this ain’t a film review blog, but it’s a good movie overall. Then we got dinner and by then it was too late to catch Fright Night. We ended up going to meet up with Josh’s buddy he was staying with and went to his friend’s birthday party at bar that was maybe called Ouija? Maybe I’m making that up. It didn’t have a sign I saw but I feel like that’s what we were calling it. If you live in Chicago, it’s across from this place:

What happens in Las Vegas Night Club…

Anyway, it was fun and I talked to some really neat Chicago Artist folks. I also played AND WON my first game of shuffle board. A successful evening.

Saturday I finally made it to the convention center to pick up my badge. By then the rest of the crew had arrived so I met up with a few for lunch near the theater. We took too long to catch the beginning of Some Kind of Hate, but we caught the middle of after Josh filled us in since he worked on it and saw it already as well.

We left before the end because Josh (Awesomefest) had invited us to be in this live segment they were doing before the Bruce Campbell Evil Dead reunion panel live stream. It was fun. I just sat there and reacted. I was just happy to be there.

Mr. Holland’s input

ConTV live

Our premiere wasn’t until 9pm, so we had time to meet a few more of us for dinner. Service was slow, but the food was good. We made it out in time.

Before the show

Photo op

In the theater, obvs!

Look how many of us were there!

Questions…

& Answers

Q&A

Post Q&A

The turnout was great, the reactions were loud, and a lot of people stayed for the Q&A. I got to talk about (spoiler?) the crazy makeup process I went though.

After the movie we went to a bar, then another bar, then… I think in the end we were at some bar named for a country singer I’m forgetting the name of (Looked it up- Toby Keith’s I love this Bar & Grill) which earlier had the longest line, but once we got inside, I really have no idea why. Anyway, we got hella drunk over the course of the evening.

Then Sunday I flew home!

It was a great time. I didn’t see much of Chicago, but whatever. I’ll just have to go visit again sometime. I at least got to see some of my friends that live there and also hang out with a cute little dog.